A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Tag: The Washington Post

The Washington Postreports on the latest ruling by the Federal Election Commission:

William Lee Stotts of Cordova, Tenn., filed a complaint in October alleging that Obama’s appearance on Winfrey’s popular talk show during the Democratic primaries amounted to an unlawful campaign contribution that gave him an ‘an unfair advantage over the other candidates, both Republican and Democrat, who were deprived such an opportunity.’

The FEC decided that Winfrey was a media entity and thus qualified for the “media exemption” from the campaign finance laws. Without that exemption, Obama’s appearance would have become an electioneering communication and thereby a violation of McCain-Feingold.

The FEC provides a timely reminder that we no longer have a unified First Amendment. Congress shall indeed “make no law” regarding the freedom of the media, including the freedom to publicize a presidential candidacy. That’s a good thing, by the way. The bad thing is the rest of us are expected to make do with Congress making all kinds of laws limiting freedom of speech. Some animals, I suppose, are more equal than other animals.

Last week, a U.S. Department of Education study revealed that students participating in a Washington D.C. voucher pilot program outperformed peers attending public schools.

According to The Washington Post, the study found that “students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school.” In a statement, education secretary Arne Duncan said that the Obama administration “does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.”

Why then did the Obama administration “let Congress slash the jugular of DC’s school voucher program despite almost certainly having an evaluation in hand showing that students in the program did better than those who tried to get vouchers and failed?”

The answer, says Cato scholar Neal McCluskey, lies in special interests and an unwillingness to embrace change after decades of maintaining the status quo:

It is not just the awesome political power of special interests, however, that keeps the monopoly in place. As Terry Moe has found, many Americans have a deep, emotional attachment to public schooling, one likely rooted in a conviction that public schooling is essential to American unity and success. It is an inaccurate conviction — public schooling is all-too-often divisive where homogeneity does not already exist, and Americans successfully educated themselves long before “public schooling” became widespread or mandatory — but the conviction nonetheless is there. Indeed, most people acknowledge that public schooling is broken, but feel they still must love it.

Susan L. Aud and Leon Michos found the program saved the city nearly $8 million in education costs in a 2006 Cato studythat examined the fiscal impact of the voucher program.

The New York Timesreports, “President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.”

In Case You Couldn’t Join Us
Cato hosted a number of fascinating guests recently to speak about new books, reports and projects.

Salon writer Glenn Greenwald discussed a new Cato study that examines the successful drug decriminalization program in Portugal.

Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute explained his project to build self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to break free of national governments and start their own societies on the ocean.

Dambisa Moyo, author of the book Dead Aid, spoke about her research that shows how government-to-government aid fails. She proposed an “aid-free solution” to development, based on the experience of successful African countries.

The World Bank issued a press release on Tuesday announcing the results of a study published March 2, which concludes that 17 of the 20 so-called G-20 countries have invoked at least some protectionist measures since pledging last November to avoid protectionism for at least one year.

Well, we all know that trade barriers do threaten the global economy — in times of economic expansion and contraction. But most of the measures cited in the report are not particularly spectacular or unusual from a trade perspective. For better or worse, most WTO member countries do have some latitude to raise trade barriers — sometimes unconditionally. But also, in any given year, governments institute policies that happen to have adverse affects on trade (even if the measure wasn’t intended to be protectionist).

Sometimes aggrieved interests in affected countries prevail upon their governments to protest or otherwise seek resolution. And more often than not, under those circumstances, resolution is achieved. But sometimes, a protectionist measure doesn’t even provoke any kind of protest. So, quantifying protectionist measures is one thing, but qualifying them is quite another, more important exercise, if one is interested in making judgments about protectionist trends.

The Obama administration is aggressively reworking U.S. trade policy to more strongly emphasize domestic and social issues, from the displacement of American workers to climate change.

But nothing in the story supports the assertion that anyone is “aggressively reworking U.S. trade policy.” Nothing supports the subhead that there is a growing dissatisfaction with global markets. Trade policy may be in for some changes simply because there’s a new sheriff in town, who is beholden (to what extent we shall see) to interests that oppose competition, but not because of dissatisfaction with global markets.

Certainly there is no evidence of dissatisfaction with global markets in the story, which was occasioned by Ron Kirk’s confirmation hearing as U.S. Trade Representative. Kirk testified—before a Senate that already has before it legislation to make enforcement, rather than negotiation, the priority of trade policy for the next couple years—that he intends to focus on enforcement, rather than negotiation. Well, duh! What else is a nominee whose fate depends on the blessing of the people who want more enforcement going to say? For the record, it’s been known for quite some time that the administration would focus on systematizing enforcement efforts, so that’s not really news.

What is newsworthy, however, are the parts of Ron Kirk’s testimony that went unrevealed in Faiola’s reporting. For example, Kirk said that “at an appropriate time and with proper congressional input and concerns addressed,” the administration would ask Congress to grant the president fast-track trade negotiating authority, which is a tool required only by presidents interested in negotiating and expanding trade.

Kirk also said that “We are mindful that the benefits of trade are diffuse, while its pain is often concentrated. It is within that context that we seek to restore and build new bipartisan support for a progressive trade agenda for America.” Where, then, is the reporting that the Obama administration does not reject trade? Where is the headline that Obama seeks support for a progressive trade agenda? (Cato is publishing a paper next month by Scott Lincicome and me that explains how President Obama can help restore the pro-trade consensus, which includes a large section on the role the media has played in perpetuating destructive myths about trade and globalization).

Where is the reporting that Democrats in Congress are not all opposed to trade liberalization? Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus told Kirk during the hearing: “I also want to find a way to begin consideration of the three pending trade agreements. We should start with Panama. That’s the agreement that’s most ready for action. And it’s the agreement that will win the greatest level of support.” Reporting on these matters would be newsworthy and constructive since so few in the media seem to be willing to publish stories that contravene conventional wisdom about trade.

The fact of the matter is that there isn’t any discernible trend toward protectionism in the United States or in the world right now. World leaders issue warnings about the consequences of protectionism, but there are not trends. There are incidences, but no trends. The ballyhooed World Bank paper cites 78 trade measures “proposed and/or implemented,” 66 of which involved trade restrictions, 47 of which eventually took effect. The long footnote associated with the presentation of these numbers (footnote 1) includes the following sentence: “It is important to note that it is difficult to distinguish the trade policy measures that are taken in response to the current crisis from measures that might have been taken anyway.”

Most of the 47 measures cited in the report happened in November and December of 2008, and Faiola already ranted about them in the WP on December 22, 2008:

Moving to shield battered domestic manufacturers from foreign imports, Indonesia is slapping restrictions on at least 500 products this month, demanding special licenses and new fees on imports. Russia is hiking tariffs on imported cars, poultry and pork. France is launching a state fund to protect French companies from foreign takeovers. Officials in Argentina and Brazil are seeking to raise tariffs on products from imported wine and textiles to leather goods and peaches, according to the World Trade Organization.

There may be nothing necessarily incorrect about the facts reported. But the tone and implications are possibly misleading. It is hard to accept the otherwise marginally significant facts without also accepting the provocative metaphors and sense of impending doom. Those actions have less antagonistic explanations and more benign interpretations.

For example, the actions of Indonesia, Argentina, and Brazil are consistent with their rights under the WTO agreements and will have a negligible collective impact on world trade. Russia is not even a member of the WTO and frequently behaves outside of international norms, so its actions have very limited representative value. And France has intervened to block foreign takeovers of French companies on other occasions this decade, so its actions are not particularly noteworthy.

At least the World Bank study is careful enough to report some of the positive trade developments and reasons for optimism that I discuss in more detail in this paper that Cato published last week. The World Bank notes 10 instances of trade liberalization around the world, which presumably includes Mexico’s admirable decision to reduce tariff rates on 70 percent of the products listed in its tariff schedule; Brazil’s decision to scrap tariffs on certain raw materials, components, capital goods; China’s decision to forego inclusion of Buy China provisions in its own massive spending bill; and the signing of new free trade agreements between Australia, New Zealand, and the ASEAN countries.

The WB study, like my paper, points out that the sturdy legal and institutional infrastructure of the GATT/WTO system combined with the fact of growing interdependence between countries that are now linked by transnational supply chains will likely diminish prospects for more consequential protectionist indulgences.

Of course Anthony Faiola is not the only person at The Washington Post guilty of hyping protectionist rhetoric and war metaphors in trade stories (and the WP is not the only media outlet engaging in hype). But one of the more egregious disconnects between headline/subhead/lead and the body of the story is found in an article on U.S.-China trade relations by Faiola’s colleague, Ariana Eunjung Cha (which is dissected and analyzed here).

World policymakers and policy watchers do need to be vigilant about ensuring that the world doesn’t descend into a protectionist abyss. They will have plenty of help from their domestic constituencies who rely on open trade in both directions. But some vigilance must be reserved for a media that, if left unchallenged, could provoke a trade war on its own. The more reporting there is about protectionist measures—even if it is just more reporting about the same protectionist measures (as today’s WP article is)—the more justified or compelled policymakers will eventually feel in turning to that poison. If a Congressman’s aide can point to articles that cite rising protectionism, even if the measures cited don’t justify the label of protectionism, it becomes less taboo to propose or support protectionist policies. That kind of fear mongering needs to be identified as such.

Yes, some countries are likely to dabble in some degree of protectionism—either with border measures or the more camouflaged regulatory variety. But the costs of that protectionism will quickly become apparent in a world where capital and talent flow to the jurisdictions with the fewest physical and administrative frictions.

Maybe that story will be written as the economy is on its way back up.

The attack by lawmakers on AIG pay has provoked renewed complaints from some financial company executives that federal involvement in business decisions is making it difficult for struggling firms to return to profitability. In particular, executives say they need to offer bonuses to keep and motivate their most valuable employees and are already seeing an exodus of talent.

Duh, how could anyone in business not expect federal interference? The government constantly meddles even when it is not bailing out everyone hither and yon. But if it’s paying the corporate bills, how could anyone expect it not to get involved?

I have a novel idea. Maybe business should stop going to Uncle Sam hat-in-hand asking for taxpayer alms.

President Obama hosted almost 150 elected officials, doctors, patients, business owners, and insurers on Thursday for a White House forum on health care reform. The Washington Postreports Obama “reiterated his intention to press for legislation this year that dramatically expands insurance coverage, improves health care quality and reins in skyrocketing medical costs.”

The Obama administration and its allies mainly seek greater government control over one-seventh of the U.S. economy and some of our most important, personal, and private decisions. They favor individual and employer mandates, increased insurance regulation, middle-class subsidies, and a government-run system in competition with private insurance. On the other side are those who seek free market reforms and more consumer-centered health care.

These differences are profound and important. They cannot and should not be papered over by easy talk of bipartisanship.

If there is a lesson which U.S. policymakers can take from national health care systems around the world, it is not to follow the road to government-run national health care, but to increase consumer incentives and control.

To find out how the free market system can increase health care security, read University of Chicago professor John H. Cochrane’s new policy analysis, which explains how markets can “provide life-long, portable health security, while enhancing consumer choice and competition.”

Battle Over Washington DC School Choice Program Continues

Congressional Democrats are considering cutting the funding for a pilot education program that sends low-income children in Washington, D.C., to private schools through vouchers. The program serves as an example of how helpful school choice programs can be to children who are born into families that cannot afford to send them to good schools.

Adam Schaeffer, policy analyst at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, says even the mainstream media is on the side of school choice this time.

For comprehensive research on the effectiveness of charter schools, private schools, and voucher programs, read Herbert J. Walberg’s book, School Choice: The Findings.

Cato Celebrates Women’s History Month

The Cato Institute pays homage to three women during Women’s History Month who unabashedly defended individualism and free-market capitalism early in the 1940s — an age that widely considered American capitalism dead and socialism the future.

On Rand’s centennial, Cato executive vice president David Boaz highlighted the many contributions she made to liberty:

Although she did not like to acknowledge debts to other thinkers, Rand’s work rests squarely within the libertarian tradition, with roots going back to Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Paine, Bastiat, Spencer, Mill, and Mises. She infused her novels with the ideas of individualism, liberty, and limited government in ways that often changed the lives of her readers. The cultural values she championed — reason, science, individualism, achievement, and happiness — are spreading across the world.